Unending Nora

Chapter 35

Julie Shigekuni 299 Chapter 35 As the rental car climbed the San Gabriel mountain range out of the Valley, the thermostat rose. Saburo insisted it wasn’t anything to worry about, but Elinore, concerned that the car would overheat, recalled a story she’d once heard about her mother’s parents. In her mind’s eye she saw them just out of the internment camps, their car dwarfed by the wide fields of Central California as they traveled the old highway south, past Bakersfield. The old road still existed. Elinore had noted it out her window along with a few cars traveling it like spiders traversing their spin, imagining the lives of her grandparents. Having spent too long held in by retaining fences, they envisioned, beyond the barbed wire and desert, a home. They longed to be close to the ocean where in the perpetual sound of waves amnesia might be possible, the summer air cool and harmless. They were summoning the courage to imagine their lives as they crested the peak between the Santa Susanas and San Gabriels. Looking beyond the heat to the Valley blossoming below, they swore they could almost see water when their car began to shimmy and sputter, and with barely a dime between them, they were stranded. There in the beginning lay the Valley, and seeing it their eyes focused quickly on what was familiar. Closer and more reachable than a phone call to relatives, the fields and orchards were a setting to which their eyes were accustomed, the beauty of furrows racing away from long rural roads like the days leading up to Unending Nora 300 Nora’s disappearance. But Elinore reminded herself that this was not her story, not her memory. Her grandfather, his thick wrists bent over the steering wheel, sweat dripping down his back, said to her grandmother, We may as well settle here for a while. We can get work. And her grandmother looking behind her at her fiveyear -old daughter said, Why not? Years later, Grandmother Mizuno would recount this moment as a turning point in her daughter’s life, summoning the lonely look of the land they left behind in shades of brown, its starkness echoed by the anger in her daughter’s eyes that gave a conflicting message—you are not my real parents; please don’t leave me here alone. Hideko hadn’t remembered being present in the back seat of the car. Though I must have been there, she once reflected, calculating the years on her fingers. Elinore had listened to both sides until she’d known enough to come to her own conclusions. After a few months of picking fruit, the Mizunos had saved up enough money to pay for car repairs, only the inclination to drive over the hill to Los Angeles had left them. Their days were hot and full from dawn to midday, and by evening they were too tired. How could they have known then that the love they’d wrought into tomatoes ripe on the vine would vanish, paved streets and rows of houses taking their place? How could they have known about the smog? Or that the Valley would be ten degrees hotter and dryer than Los Angeles in the summer? Succumbing to the prodding glances cast over his shoulder, Saburo suggested that they turn the heater on, give the engine a chance to cool down, and relieved to be doing something Elinore rolled her window down, surprised at the coolness of the outside air as it rushed into the car. The darkening sky evoked the night not long ago that she’d driven Naoko to meet Melissa at the church carnival. “Isn’t the Valley beautiful?” her daughter had said. Elinore, who couldn’t recall ever thinking so, told Naoko ‘yes.’ She’d come to understand the important connection the child drew between beautiful and home, the short path between love and familiarity. Driving the congested Valley streets along miles Julie Shigekuni 301 of concrete boulevards and strip malls, passing only an occasional flower bed or planter box, she’d told her daughter the story that hardly anyone seemed to know: how beneath the well-polished smoothness of Valley life, the perpetual newness that promised redemption, lay the broken roots of citrus trees, the remains of carrots, tomatoes, and onions. Unsatisfied by her mother’s rendition , Naoko had asked to hear about the wedding...